Page 37 of Antihero
I stare back at her. Decide not to lie. “Yes.”
“Good.” I raise an eyebrow. “They’re true,” she says.
“I have to confess, I expected you to take a different stance.”
“I won’t defend that bastard.”
“You’re separated, I take it?”
“As much as I can be.”
“Meaning?”
She sighs, entwining her fingers on the table. I note that she still wears her wedding ring. She toys with it now, seeming to struggle for words for the first time since the beginning of this odd meet. “There’s… a centralised power, on White Rock.”
“Right…”
“A boys' club.” She pulls a face. “A dwindling one, thanks to this Wraith, but a club nonetheless.”
“Harry is in it?”
She nods. “They support each other through court cases, kill any negative stories about their roles in the asylum…”
“Harry was a surgeon there,” I say.
“Yes, that was his role. And that’s controversial enough.”
I frown and decide to ask anyway, even though it might give away my true motivations. “Did you or Harry know Frank Elvin?” I ask. He’s the only one I haven’t been able to nail down the role of. Aside from being an ‘investor’ in the girls' home. Nick ran the asylum, so that’s enough for the Wraith to be interested in him. The second death, before I arrived at White Rock, was a man who used to be a guard in the mad ward a decade ago. And the one dead woman was the matron of the girls’ home. Based on what I could find about her, she was a right witch. So much for looking like a sweet grandmother in the obituary.
Her eyes narrow on me. “What story are you doing, again?”
“It could be interesting to include.”
“Well, Harry never tells me much. But yes, he and Frank were… in touch. Frank was some sort of liaison at the ward. A connection between Eternal Light and housing for the cured, back in Tregam.”
“Sounds innocent,” I say doubtfully.
Her chuckle is humourless. “Think again. The homes 'cured' girls were being sent to in Tregam were businesses. Not the savoury kind.”
“But why?”
She spreads her hands. “Simple-minded workers? Already broken by the madhouse? Which is what the asylum was, back then. Make no mistake.”
“And there was a profit in that?”
As though holding class, Marion explains to me. “So, here’s how the asylum worked; As a private institution doing a public service, it was paid by the state for every patient housed—so, the longer the better, for some, yes?” I’ve heard of the same policy before of course, in prisons and similar places. I didn’t know the asylum ran under it.
“I suppose,” I agree, feeling a little sick. Whose idea of the right incentive isthat?
She holds up a finger. “But they were also paid—slightly less in the long run—for every patient cured enough to leave and get on with their life. I want you to think about what ‘cured’ might mean. Not thriving, that’s for sure. For some, it might mean being a vegetable—but not a violent one—for the rest of their lives. Maybe at the asylum, therefore...” She rubs her thumb and forefinger together.
Right. Guaranteed income for the asylum. “Something tells me there’s more.” Though suddenly I'm not sure I want to know it.
“Your intuition tells you right. There are the others, the ones who leave. Where’s the profit in that, if Eternal Light was better off housing more for longer, for life, even? Well, as I mentioned, the homes they were sent to on the mainland were businesses. Most of the patients who passed through that place were women—take what you will from that.”
“Explain it to me, anyway.”
“Well, who better for a brothel than a sterilised woman?”
